President's Pages in Princeton Alumni Weekly

Two Lives

May 15, 2002

This year I
have been living two lives: one as a university president and a second as a
professor of molecular biology. From Monday until Thursday and on weekends I
don my new role and work in Nassau Hall, or elsewhere on campus, meeting with
faculty, staff, students and alumni on university affairs. But on Friday I
revert to my old identity and spend the day in Lewis Thomas Laboratory thinking
about mammalian genetics with members of my laboratory. We have a lab meeting
in which one member of the lab presents his or her work and receives critical
feedback on both the execution and interpretation of results. We work on
manuscripts to be submitted for publication and plan future experiments. During
April, I also taught the introductory molecular biology course, MOL214, in the
beautiful new Friend Center for Engineering Education.

This double life is both a necessity and a blessing. When I
was named president last May, I was the head of a large enterprise composed of
two members of the Class of 2002 who had just begun work on their senior
theses, three graduate students who were in the midst of their Ph.D. training,
eight postdoctoral fellows gaining additional experience before heading off to
positions in academia and industry and three technical staff members. The work
of these young scientists needed to continue until they received their degrees
and completed their fellowships; hence the necessity. The blessing comes from
the chance to continue the intellectual work that has been so exciting and
rewarding. In this way I have been able to avoid going “cold turkey” on the
work that has engaged me so completely for the last 30 years.

One of the most striking things I have discovered about this
double life is the contrast between the approach of a scholar and that required
of a university president. To be successful scientists must focus on one or a
few important problems to the exclusion of all other things. Scientists are
burrowers: once a good problem has been identified, it is essential that you
dig deeply into it, paying close attention to the details, ignoring the
peripheral issues that will distract you from getting to the essence of the
problem. Good scientists live with their primary data, pouring over it again
and again to extract its essential meaning. At the same time, scientists need
to guard against becoming overly narrow. If you are too narrow, you can miss
essential connections that are often the key to making the next leap forward.

Here is where teaching is so valuable to a working
scientist. In a very real sense teaching and research are complementary
activities. It is through teaching that scientists are forced to think broadly
so they can present to students a coherent picture of the discipline. I became
a much better scientist when I began to teach at Princeton in large part
because of the breadth of my teaching assignments. A freshman seminar on
developmental biology forced me to stand back from the details of my own work
on mammals and identify the common ideas that are used to direct the
development of all organisms. By reading with students classic papers from well
outside my own specialty I gained new insights into my own work.

Teaching also forces you to come face to face with the
limits of your knowledge. There is no more effective way to reveal the
superficiality of your understanding of a subject than to contemplate standing
in front of a class of bright and curious students, trying to explain how
something works.

A university president must, of necessity, function
completely differently from the burrowing scientist. Most of the time breadth
must trump depth as enormously diverse issues come to my office every day, from
strategic decisions for the investment of the endowment, to the role of
sororities and fraternities in campus life, to the future of neuroscience to
the quality of our benefits plan. It is impossible to be an expert in all these
areas, and therefore I must rely on my colleagues to do the hard work of thinking
through such questions carefully before bringing them to me for discussion.
Instead of the luxury of having large blocks of time to devote to a single
question, as I would in the laboratory, I spend my time in a large number of
short meetings. Although some of my time is spent analyzing and solving
problems, as I would in science, my work as president has a distinctly
different flavor to it—I no longer know more than anyone else about most of the
subjects at hand.

Princeton has a strong tradition of drawing its presidents
from the faculty, and I am inspired by the example of my predecessors who made
the transition I am going through this year. I also know that my Fridays in the
laboratory, and my teaching in Friend Center, allow me to immerse myself directly
in our fundamental mission—the education of talented undergraduate and graduate
students who will go on to serve this nation and the world with distinction.